


how to feel

by moonbeatblues



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, excuse most things about this, i need to get back in the mode, whoof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:14:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24801418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: Yeza kisses her and even in the moment, she thinks, people have kissed other people better than this.—“Did she ever thank you?”“Hm?”“Veth. For offering.”(two character studies)
Relationships: Caduceus Clay & Beauregard Lionett, Nott & Caleb Widogast, Veth Brenatto & Caleb Widogast, Veth Brenatto/Yeza Brenatto
Comments: 3
Kudos: 88





	how to feel

**Author's Note:**

> dude i am Not over that conversation they had outside isharnai’s hut, how beau got yelled at for..... caring.....

Okay, so it happens like this, right?

She never— she always thought she’d be alone because there was nothing else to be.

Yeza kisses her and even in the moment she thinks,  _people have kissed other people better than this._

He’s nervous, smells a little like the sweat of a day’s work, and it’s not much of a motion, more of a press.

It’s when he pulls away to breathe and look sheepish, when she has a second to think about why it is he would be nervous, why it is he looks sheepish at  her and not his friends, that this feeling rushes through her, bright and staticky.

Home has always been full of people who never found her much of anything. She has to recognize that idea as finite, fallible, when it turns out Yeza thinks about her at all. When she’s not there and everything.

Being loved, being seen, it’s new enough she doesn’t really stop to think that Yeza’s in a different group and not just outside of one. It’s not even close to being big enough, you see, for it to need a name.

—

Finding Caleb handsome is a monstrous thing, for sure. The big minotaur with his breastplate and horns, even moreso.

Her hair hangs in strings when they meet, limp black like yarn. Matted with her own blood from days ago, weeks ago.

At home she has a fine-toothed comb her mother gave her on her wedding day. A simple, scratched mirror hung over their washbasin, for her to watch herself in while she ran the comb through her hair in the morning.

If she had it now, she thinks, she’d break it and use the teeth to get at the lock of her door. It makes a savage kind of sense that she looks like this when he reaches a hand through the bars to envelop hers and says they’re going to get out, just as soon as he’s rested.

It’s when she finds the mask, tugs it off a broken doll, that she remembers the last time she’s seen someone cry was Luc.

(Well, she’d seen the spouse of that goblin wail when she’d killed him, but she’s not so much in the space to be counting that.)

Caleb cries quiet, only at night, and with his face pressed into the belly of the cat he’d pulled out of thin air, and she tugs the mask over the surely monstrous slash of her mouth and thinks that it must be simple, that it’s the new wickedness of her mind that has her confused, that she must overcome it. She has traded someone to protect for another. That is all.

—

Fjord tells them that he files down his teeth and it seems a little clever, more than anything.

Caleb’s eyebrows pull together the way she knows gives him headaches and it’s the known pain of that that hits her more immediately than the thought of how much it really hurts to file down your teeth. Maybe, partially, because she hopes it might not be too much to bear. Not in the past tense, but in the hypothetical, the potential future. Not for Fjord, but for herself.

Beau looks upset, but then again she always does. Jester curls a hand over her mouth, over the milk-white points of her own teeth, and she thinks,  _well, on someone so lovely, it wouldn’t even be something to consider._

He decides to stop, eventually. She thinks of it like how she stops pulling up the mask every time they’re in town, when they’re together. It feels brazen and cowardly all at once, relying on the group for protection against the same disgust in others that she feels in her bones.

She thinks that Asarius inspires something savage in her. There’s something soothing about staying west of the Ashkeepers even as she is now, having awareness of the order she was raised on even as she exists on the brunt end of it.

The goblin in the pits, Zorth, she wonders if he was born in the city when it was a city. It must be the order that the Dynasty, strange and barbaric as they have to be, gives, that makes him look so comfortable in the authority he has.

The Sunbreaker is enormous, broad enough to block out the sun when he stands over her. He has a smooth sort of voice she doesn’t expect to hear. Behind them in the streets, goblins— people who look like her— scurry between shops, run the shops, live brazen and with the seeming absence of cowardice, and she doesn’t like that it’s the same feeling, bright and staticky, that comes over her when she looks at Olomon.

It’s the city, she thinks, it’s a frenzied sort of pass at a life that feels normal when she knows it is not, that possesses her when she asks if he has a wife. If here it is such that a goblin sells her her breakfast, it is here that she can shove aside the thought of her husband. Only here, as a goblin, and only now, until she has found him again, and then it will pass.

Asarius is like a dream— not an imagined paradise, but a glimpse of a reality that is not her own. When they have departed it again, when Caleb has returned her to herself, these feelings will flee her with the same speed of coming awake.

She thinks this to herself, mind more than empty of the feeling in her stomach, cold and vacuous and dark and afraid, that will come over her when she crawls from the shards of the bathtub to find that she feels exactly the same. To find that Caleb looks no less handsome when he smiles at her, relief and wonder and love painted across his face in a bright, obvious stroke. 

That she could love her husband fiercely, her son even moreso, as herself, as the woman that Yeza kissed in front of his friends with shaking hands, as a mother— and find the feelings, from that day in the city she wanted so badly to be a dream, have not left her, is something she does not consider long enough to fear, before she finds it to be true.

—

“Why weren’t you angry?”

Fjord’s out cold. There’s seafoam, a rime of salt, laced pink by blood, drying in a trail from his mouth and down his throat. Caduceus is at the desk by their bed, looking into a mug. The glimpse she catches reveals it hasn’t been washed out in a few days, and a funny pink bloom is developing along the inside.

Caduceus turns in time for her to return her gaze to her hands. “Hm?”

“Back outside the hut. You said you understood. You didn’t tell me I didn’t care.“

“Did you want me to?”

“I just— Fjord and Caleb were really angry. They care about the group. I know you do, too.”

“Yes, I do.”

“But you weren’t mad.”

And Caduceus seems to verge on anger, then, for a moment— it’s a rare thing, he just puts down his cup and stands, rather bluntly, walks over to sit beside her on the bed.

“Miss Beau, how do you know that I care about everyone?”

“I mean, you heal us all the time, when you could be doing Jester’s cool stuff— you came with us to kill Lorenzo just because we asked you. You never heal yourself, you didn’t even make Veth apologize when she fuckin’  _killed_ you—“

“Actions.”

“Yeah.”

“You do a lot of acting, as well.”

“Yeah, I mean—“

“You run up to things ten times larger than yourself, and you punch them. And when they try to attack anyone besides you, you stop them. Yasha stabbed you—  _through_ you— and then you fought next to her. You’ve spoken to royalty on our behalf, three times.”

She says nothing, won’t look at him. The thought occurs that maybe Beauregard Lionett could count on her fingers the number of people who will tell her she does good. On one hand, even.

“What did you say, to Isharnai? Just. Say it out loud, what your offer was.”

“I said I’d leave, if she un-cursed Veth. That I’d be alone again.”

“You offered your happiness for someone else.”

“Yeah, but it was stupid.”

“Maybe. Maybe you underestimate how much you’re needed. But it would be stupider to not see that you care for your friend. A friend who would not do the same for you.”

He looks over at Fjord, sleeping peacefully, deep breaths, like the entirety of his body is devoted to the task of maintaining them. “You know, Fjord and Caleb like to talk about the group. They announce what it means, when they do something. Maybe it helps them understand. I think maybe, when they were trying to convince you to say that you cared, they were not trying to convince you, but themselves.”

“Well, I mean, I could say it more—“

“It is not a good defense to be made, that someone else is at fault when you fail to interpret them.”

“Oh.”

“We would have found you, again,” he says, and smiles like it’s not supposed to make her cry. “Isharnai, whatever she is, couldn’t have stopped us. In another world, we would have killed her.”

She laughs, and presses her palm under her eye. “We still could.”

“I would be angry, if she took you from us. Jester, I think, would be furious beyond anything we’ve seen. But expressing anxiety, fear of losing someone by being angry with them rather that the thing that would take them, it’s a negative for a negative. Hurt, trying to solve hurt. I don’t think it has helped you understand that you care, to be told you don’t.”

He looks at the ceiling for a long moment.

“Did she ever thank you?”

“Hm?”

“Veth. For offering.”

“No— I, she almost said it made sense, which might be worse. She told me she was glad I looked out for Caleb, in that tub.”

“She didn’t thank you, for offering the thing you cared about most so she could be returned. And afterwards, she allowed Fjord and Caleb to tell you that it was an act of not caring.”

“Guess so.”

“Well, I’ll say it,” and he takes her hand. “Thank you, Beau.”

“I— you’re welcome.”

He turns to look at Fjord again. “He should say it, too. Maybe more than once.”

“He— I know he thinks it.”

“If he expects you to express that you care the way he understands it, you can expect the same of him.”

_I’m not good at expecting things,_ she doesn’t say, because he knows it already.

“You know what’s funny, Miss Beau?” There’s a small smile on his face.

“What?”

“I hear, a lot, from Veth and even Fjord and Caleb, sometimes, that you’re angry, yourself. Prickly. That it’s hard to talk to you.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m a little disappointed I have yet to see it.”

There’s a warm, fuzzy sort of feeling burgeoning, like being healed, enough it makes a smile unfurl on her face. “You could try telling me I don’t care.”

**Author's Note:**

> i’m @seafleece on tumblr, come say hello!


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